Eying agile software development teams, Atlassian will release on Wednesday an upgrade to its Bamboo continuous integration server that adds continuous deployment functionality.

Bamboo 3.0 enables developers to automate the build process and spur software testing. Agile development teams can reduce hours from their software development times, identify problems, and gain insight into development practices, Atlassian said. Continuous deployment in version 3.0 adds to previous capabilities for building and testing code, said Giancarlo Lionetti, product marketing manager for development tools at Atlassian.

The product leverages the notion of continuous development going on in an agile shop, Lionetti said. "The idea here is this kind of plays into that whole continuous deployment, continuous development process," he said.

Also featured in Bamboo 3.0 is the ability to integrate with the Mercurial distributed version control system. The product already had limited support for the Git version control system but improves upon that, the company said. Other new capabilities include a new UI, to make it easier to find information about a build; software artifact-sharing, for saving on build time; tighter integration with Atlassian's bug tracker; and bug fixes.

Bamboo has been used with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to scale large builds in a cloud environment, Atlassian said. The company also is revealing that it has acquired two plug-ins: Jira Workflow Designer, which plugs into Jira and visualizes a workflow, and Bamboo Release Management, which links to Bamboo and combines Bamboo and Jira to automate software release management. The plug-ins were acquired from Sysbliss and will now be offered for free. They had been commercially sold before.